Future of Work. The New Learning Mode. And the problem EdTech should solve

I am going to talk about two things today. And the second thing is going to connect with the first one.

First Thing. Impact of mentors/advisors in life. It’s profound. It makes all the difference. In my life, I owe whatever little I have been able to do to a bunch of very good mentors, who had my back during different facets of life. They showed me the right direction, helped me envision beyond my means, and ensured I had a clear growth path. I also realise that this happened for two reasons: (a) I definitely was fortunate to be at the right place at the right time – staring from as early as access to good education, and migrant parents who were hell bent on making their kid good enough, and (b) my personal desire to ‘constantly learn’ and do incrementally better things everyday, which was aided largely by the fact that I was an extrovert, who liked (/likes) to have fun. Minus the ‘a’ and ‘b’, I wonder where I’d have been. But that’s really not how it should be. What if this access to ‘growing yourself 10x wasn’t limited to a few folks’? This problem statement fascinates me, and I continue to madly think about it/do something to solve it, every single day.

Clarity about ‘what you want to do’ and ‘how you want to get there’ is by far one of the most important problems out there, and EdTech in 2017-18 today is well positioned to do radically fascinating stuff around it. Because this is what will essentially move humankind forward.

Okay. The Second Thing now. Future of Work. How many of us really think hard about what’s the future of work like? I mean – a whole lot of jobs that exist today were nowhere to be seen 10 years back. For example, take anything that has the iOS AppStore or the Google Play store as its ground floor – it just wasn’t there.

So what do the jobs of 2025 look like? Is it a lot of Virtual Reality, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and mean Robotics? Or is it stuff we can’t even begin to think about right now? Latter, in my opinion. It’s going to be far more mad than what we expect it to be.

So what next? How can we get ready for this future of work?

By changing our #learning mode. By learning more from real life. EdTech is not just about online learning or reframing existing supplementary education. EdTech is more innovative than that. EdTech of the future will shape how each one of us become 10x of ourselves – in how we learn. And the future of learning will be from everything around us – the everyday that’s moving at such rapid pace. In a world where technology beautifully blends in, the beautiful stuff will happen where human emotions meet emerging technologies. Mentors, friends, the bar – everything is going to matter. Learning 3.0. The problem EdTech should solve.